Emilia Wickstead

<a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/spring-summer-2014/ready-to-wear/emilia-wickstead">Emilia Wickstead's woman has left the warming, familiar surroundings of her usual holiday hot spots and headed south, way south.

To the rhythm and blues of Al Green's Lets Stay Together and Dusty Springfield's Son of a Preacher's Man, Wickstead opened with a matelass&eacute; buoyant full skirt and cropped blouse in waffled, prettiest palest pink silk. Other versions followed - all midi, some pencil-straight and slit but no less weightless and airy - in Fifties primrose, pistachio and vibrant pops of classic red; the exact sort of hue this woman paints her lips using a hand mirror in the back of her chauffeured Cadillac.

The designer added billowing striped gowns, and a series of silk minidresses and gentlemen's shirts printed in grand pianos and music notes with hemlines edged in keys, as though to reiterate those Mississippi tunes.

This collection was Wickstead through and through - right down to those little rectangular box bags on long straps, the designer was touting one herself, by Mark Cross, some six months ago, long before they appeared anywhere near her runway. And this works to her advantage. This collection may not have offered new ideas - although a passage of sculptural skirts and car coats in white denim felt fresh - but it doesn't really matter here: Wickstead knows who she is dressing and that's half the battle when it comes to selling clothes. Here today, she had that nailed.